Pine

The most commonly used application for reading and sending e-mail in the Math Department is pine. Simply type pine from any terminal window or select it from the Math Department Menu in GNOME. The main pine menu is navigated with the arrow keys and by pressing enter to confirm your selection. When reading your e-mail, appropriate commands are listed at the bottom of the screen. When composing messages, the commands listed at the bottom are preceded by a caret (^). The proper way to execute the command is by holding down the control key and then pressing the appropriate letter.

When you access the math department through an SSH connection or on a terminal, pine should work with default settings by accessing local files with no configuration required. However, if you need to set up pine, say on a system outside of the math department, you will need to configure it to access email through IMAP. Start pine and proceed through the following steps.

  • Type L (for Folder List)
  • Select Incoming-Folders and hit Enter
  • Type A (for Adding a new folder)
  • In the server name prompt, type heaviside.mit.edu/ssl/user= <user-id>/novalidate-cert (<user-id> is your user-id on the math department)
  • When prompted, type in your password and hit Enter
  • In order to use the newly created folder list, quit out of pine and start